Japan: Encasing Reactors Will Be More Difficult Than Chernobyl
April 14th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Encasing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in concrete would present much more of a challenge than Chernobyl, according to an executive of the firm whose pumps are helping cooling efforts there.
“In Chernobyl, where a single reactor was encased, 11 trucks were in action for a number of months. In Fukushima we’re talking about four reactors,” Gerald Karch, chief executive of the technical business of unlisted machinery maker Putzmeister, said in an interview with Reuters.
Very true- and they need to get off their asses and start pouring a permanent foundation around each of those buildings and start back filling with sand before monsoon season arrives in about 6 weeks. 120 mph winds and sideways rain is not something that was a factor in Chernobyl, but it very likely will be in Japan. If radiation is still spewing out at that point, and based on the current 3+ month plan to stop the radiation (HAHA!), there will end up being radiation pollution for a lot more than the current exclusion zone.
The fact that the reactor cores are now half full of hardened salt that is insulating the rods and the melted piles of rubble at the bottom of the reactors is not pleasant news either.
Arnie Gundersen’s videos are very informative and Kevin, your posts are very helpful in keeping up with this and all the other garbage that we need to be informed of.
I’m having a bit of success in convincing people on my facebook page to discontinue drinking milk and tap water unless it comes from a deep well, and to avoid fresh veggies. Canned foods should be ok until this year’s crops are in.
Like Steve said, they better get in gear on this. They haven’t even devoted a fraction of the resources the Soviets did after Chernobyl. True, the earth quake and Tsunami is overwhelming, but the reactors are going to poison the land forever. The longer they are let go, the worse it will be.The entire response of the Japanese gov’t and Tepco is totally inadequate. It’s time for the world to step in to prevent further world contamination. Libya can wait. Fix the melt-downs.
I just don’t see how they will isolate those broken machines from the ocean. There are right on the shore line. What a terrible place to put reactors for so many reasons.
This is BULLSHIT.
Where is the sense of EMERGENCY here? During the meltdown at Chernobyl, where we didn’t have the Internet like we do now I used to wake up at night from dreams of people screaming. No kidding. And I didn’t have a television then either.
This is the Gulf of Mexico Moron Spill all over again. TEPCO is now BP.
Hey Emperor of Japan, throw off your cloak of royalty and start kicking some ass. Watch Crouching Dragon, Hidden Dragon. In there you will see there a DEVILS everywhere. But my GAWD. Get A GRIP on the situation and become an EMPEROR over it. PLEASE.
Don’t let corporations that caused the disaster be in control of remedying it because they WON’T do the right thing. They have a CONFLICT OF INTEREST between doing the RIGHT THING FOR THE PEOPLE and the PLANET versus their CORPORATION and its so called ‘reputation.”
And by the way, where is TEPCO’s leader? Does no one care about whether he is in hospital, or out on his yacht riding tsunami waves for thrils? l hate to be such a moron even asking the question.
Take a look at these photos to see how spent fuel is “temporarily” stored: http://cryptome.org/eyeball/daiichi-npp7/daiichi-photos7.htm
*Maybe 8 feet above sea level
*In an open building
*In a tsunami damaged building
*In casks that they have no idea what to do with six months from now
*In pressurized vaults that can and will fail
*Permanently because there’s no other means of dealing with them
*and ONLY fuel rods that are NOT damaged. In other words, they are storing the relatively safe stuff after 14+ YEARS in the cooling pools and they have NO WAY and NO PLAN to store the damaged rods.
This is the very reason I opposed nuclear power in the 1970’s when I was in high school. Now they are pushing thorium reactors or some other such nonsense. Have they checked the half life on thorium lately? I have: 14.05 BILLION YEARS. I’m becoming a big fan of natural gas.